Research Article
‘What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico? What would Pissarro do in St Thomas?’: Francisco Oller and the art of painting the Caribbean
Maria Cristina Fumagalli*†
mcfuma@essex.ac.uk
mcfuma@btopenworld.com
liparavisini@vassar.edu
Abstract
In 1858, the Puerto Rican painter Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833–1917) arrived in Paris, where he befriended Camille Pissarro (born in St Thomas, Danish Antilles), and other ‘modern’ painters. Unlike Pissarro, who never returned to his native island, Oller spent his life living/painting, between Europe, mostly France and Spain, and Puerto Rico, seeking to understand and define Puerto Rican identity or puertorriqueñidad through his work. The disbelief with which his departure from Paris in 1865 was met by his artist friends (‘What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico?’) foregrounds the principal questions that Oller’s work engaged with: ‘What is the place of art and artists in the 19th-century Caribbean? What is the place of the Caribbean and Caribbean artists in 19th-century art?’ This article locates Oller’s explicitly articulated and implicitly inferred answers in selected works (including still-lifes and El Velorio) produced between the 1850s and 1910s.
Keywords
Francisco Oller y Cesteropuertorriqueñidadstill-lifesCaribbean artEl VelorioCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Fumagalli, M.C. & Paravisini-Gebert, L. (2025), ‘“What the hell do you want to do in Puerto Rico? What would Pissarro do in St Thomas?”: Francisco Oller and the art of painting the Caribbean’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(4): a46 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a46crossref
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